Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots

Miss Jekyll's Gardening Boots, painted in 1920 as a companion work to Nicholson's portrait of Gertrude Jekyll, stands as one of the most celebrated and discussed still life paintings in twentieth-century British art. Jekyll had suggested the boots as a subject, reportedly placing them before Nicholson as a kind of challenge. Their worn, stained, mud-caked surfaces bore the evidence of decades of creative horticultural labour, making them a metonym for their owner at least as eloquent as any formal portrait. Nicholson's treatment lifted the humble garden boot into the tradition of the loaded object — a thing saturated with use and meaning — that extends from Rembrandt's late self-portraits to Van Gogh's shoes. The Tate holds this small, decisive, and endlessly referenced work.

Nicholson painted the boots on a near-neutral ground, treating their worn leather surfaces with the same sensitive tonal observation he brought to his lustre bowls and silver objects. The materiality of old leather — its creases, stains, and deformations — is recorded with unsentimental precision. Scale and compositional simplicity ensure all attention falls on the objects alone.